


On Grief and its Effects

by dancingloki



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Pain, Philosophy, could be Johnlock or could be friendship, reader's choice take what you want from it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 03:20:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/882330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingloki/pseuds/dancingloki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How could he manage that sort of pain, when he didn’t have a heart to hold it in? How could he possibly endure it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Grief and its Effects

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ddoubletake](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ddoubletake).



“I was _so_ alone, and I owe you so much. But, please, there's just one more thing, one more thing, one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't be…dead. Would you do that just for me? Just stop it. Stop this.”

The smooth black marble mocked him, and his throat closed around the words. The old familiar ache rose in his leg as he walked—limped—away, but it didn’t trouble him. In fact he welcomed it, cherished it, relished it. Pain of the body, pain from muscle and bone and blood, was a relief—a distraction. Better than the other sort.

The other sort of pain was the kind that overwhelmed, that you couldn’t fight. There weren’t any salves that took that kind of pain away, and the only pills or medicines that helped…weren’t the sort a doctor should indulge in.

And the reprieve was _so_ brief. Drug or drink could numb it, for a while. But when it left, the pain came in its place, the kind John couldn’t handle.

What Moriarty had said the first time they first met him, about Sherlock’s heart…John had always had his own theory what it meant. Whether his theory was right or not, he knew for a fact that it was true the other way round.

Sherlock was John’s heart. Since practically the day they met. His world had been grey and cold and lifeless and he had been so tired. So empty and so hollow, and he’d thought he’d never feel that way again but his heart had been ripped out, his very heart had been torn from him.

How could he manage that sort of pain, when he didn’t have a heart to hold it in? How could he possibly endure it?

The kind of pain that becomes physical, tangible.

The kind of grief too thick and strong and sickening to weep over, and instead it settles in your chest and roots there and throws up tendrils into your throat and chokes you from the inside out.

And you can't breathe, you can't breathe, because the air's too thick and the whole world is poison and every breath you force past constricting muscles is air from a world that he's not in.

And the sick dark wrong-ness of the world grows and grows. And the hole he left in it, in you, fills up with black tarry grief that snakes around you and crawls into your nose and into your mouth and down your throat and you choke on it. Grief thickens the air until you can taste pain coating your tongue but you can't scream, you can't sob or cry or even speak because you’re breathing grief, not air, and it’s solid, it’s too thick for your larynx to vibrate. So you just sit there slowly choking to death, breathing grief in and out and drowning in it.

And a small part of you panics.

You want to thrash and flail and convulse and fight your way to the surface, but you can't, because the tar of grief in your throat carries a paralytic in it, a drug that holds you lethargic and motionless and frozen in place. So you just sit there, not even struggling for breath anymore, because the oxygen isn't reaching your muscles anyway and you are

so

so

_tired_.

John was _so_ tired.

So he just sat, alone, in the dark, in the place his heart had lived, and tried to breathe.


End file.
